Tab Article
Apart from its being connected to the famous Ben Jonson's English Grammar (1640) of which it is the main unacknowledged source, many reasons induce to render accessible to the public this unique manuscript preserved in the Royal Manuscript Collection of the British Library (12.F.xviii). Indeed it is the only extant early grammar of English to record connected speech features, that is, diafasic and diamesic variants of Early Modern English. Equally important, it reveals diatopic varieties of the language both in the pronunciation section, when the author sometimes describes what were actually Northern or West Midlands variants, or in the distribution and in the inflection of irregular verbs which again include non-standard variants. Most remarkably, its relevance to the historian of the language is that Tonkis's grammar is a clear example of multilingual practice in an Early Modern English text.
